Sigfried Giedion: Liberated Dwelling (Befreites Wohnen)

Sigfried Giedion’s small, but vocal manifesto Befreites Wohnen (1929) is an early manifestation of modernist housing ideology and as such key to the broader understanding of the ambitions of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and the debate on the industrialization of construction processes and its impact on public housing at the beginning of the twentieth century. An important step in Giedion’s rise as one of the foremost propagators of modern architecture, this manifesto is based on the argumentative power of visual comparisons, and the only book the art historian both authored and designed.

The German facsimile edition of Giedion’s Befreites Wohnen is completed by an English translation and a scholarly essay that anchors the work in the context of its time and suggests the book’s relevance for contemporary architectural discourse.

Sigfried Giedion

Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) was born in Prague on April 14, 1888, a son of Swiss textile entrepreneurs. At the behest of his parents, he obtained a degree in mechanical engineering in Vienna before studying art history under the Swiss art historian Heninrich Wölfflin in Munich. Giedion served as secretary-general of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM)—from the organization’s foundation in 1928 until its dissolution in 1959. In 1931, He was appointed Charles Eliot Norton Professor in Poetry at Harvard University for the academic year 1938–39. The collected lectures were published as Space, Time and Architecture in 1941. During the Second World War, he worked on the manuscript of Mechanization Takes Command (1948), one of the first attempts to document the anonymous history of industrialization. Throughout the second half of the 1950s, Giedion alternately taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Giedion was a prolific writer and authored more than ten monographs in a half dozen languages. On April 9, 1968, he died in Zurich.

Reto Geiser

Reto Geiser is a scholar of modern architecture with a focus on the intersections between architecture, pedagogy, and media. He is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Rice University School of Architecture, where he teaches history, theory, and design. Geiser is the author of Giedion and America: Repositioning the History of Modern Architecture (2018), the co-author of Reading Revolutionaries (2014), and the editor of the award-winning House Is a House Is a House Is a House Is a House (2016) and Explorations in Architecture (2008). He has curated the exhibition Explorations: Teaching, Design, Research, Switzerland’s official contribution to the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale, and the installation Rooms for Books at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial. A founding partner in the Houston-based design practice MG&Co., he is developing spatial strategies in a range of scales from the book to the house.